Columnist Adam Candee: Summer golf has its peaks and valleys

Adam Candee

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 | 9:03 a.m.

Adam Candee covers golf for the Sun. Reach him at (702) 259-4085 or by e-mail at candee@lasvegassun.com.

Some might wonder what kind of idiot ignores all 115 degrees of Las Vegas heat and chooses to schedule a 12:20 p.m. tee time in July.

Others have met me.

The area's finest courses lie waiting to be hacked for pennies on the dollar every summer. There is little choice but to slash prices after 11 a.m. or noon these months because no smart local or even unsuspecting tourist is shelling out big bucks to bake. Even at the cut rates, it's not exactly bustling business.

The reduced cost in dollars to the player must be made up in heat exhaustion and what surely amounts to a week or two shaved from your life, but the chance to hit up a $250 track for a fraction of a peak rate calls for just that.

I recently decided to put the cost-benefit ratio of summer afternoon golf in Las Vegas to the test. Having stared longingly at the newspaper ad for a $49 round at Rio Secco for two summers now, it was time to check what princely sum the devil would ask in return for that bargain price.

It took 64 ounces of Gatorade, nine lost balls and one overpriced mini-tube of sunscreen to find out that, in every imaginable way, you get what you pay for. That is, an excellent course, a brief psyche exam and the crying post-round need for a full-body ice bath instead of a frosty mug.

I'm not sure who dragged whom out of the air-conditioned house and into the brick oven outdoors when the tee time arrived, but my Connecticut-based cousin accompanied me for this experiment. No problem, he told me. The heat wouldn't bother him.

I offered all the standard desert dweller caveats: Load up on water before you leave, paste yourself in sunscreen, update your will and so on. And wouldn't you know that he survived just fine, and I was the pansy skipping my last two shots at No. 17 to "save strength" for the last hole.

The first few holes are no problem. That shrewd feeling of having paid small change for a big course is an aphrodisiac at the start. It doesn't even seem so hot for a hole or two as you soak in the course. Heck, you have a shaded cart, a cooler of ice and a separate cooler of cold water ... good to go.

Now, these holes go pretty fast. That's because we were one of two groups on the front nine. By groups, I mean lambs to the slaughter. Somewhere around the seventh hole, reality finally slapped me square across the forehead.

The first bottle of Gatorade long since consumed, my trips in and out of the cart quickened. Standing over a putt for more than a couple of seconds - and maybe stopping to read a line or some such nonsense - seemed less and less important as we neared the turn. That blister on my left hand swelled to the point where taking off my glove to putt became an unnecessary chore.

That's when I began to see that the challenge of Vegas bargain summer golf is truly mental. How much is it worth to you to experience a big-time course when you know that your enjoyment is just not going to be what it would on a gorgeous October morning? Plenty, I told myself again, because I'm just not paying gorgeous October morning prices.

The lost balls began piling up after the turn because I simply lost the will to venture into the cacti and rocks to find them. And they weren't all poor shots either.

The second bottle of Gatorade disappeared at No. 12. So too did a great deal of my patience.

What must also be remembered about these high-end tracks is that they are dreamed up by high-end designers, usually with high-end - or at least high-skill - golfers in mind. For a guy who carries a "1" cover on his 3-wood, like I do, these courses can be extremely hard.

That's not to say that hard equals unpleasant. The challenge, both of playing the course and of not falling down from fatigue while doing so, is fun. Of course, maybe it takes an idiot like me to think so.

There is undoubtedly a cost in both energy and sanity in taking on one of the Valley's best on a summer afternoon. The benefit of experiencing a place you might never otherwise play, however, made it worthwhile.